Some companies seem to be very proud of the fact that they are not using agencies. They are using internal resources to do all the sourcing, recruiting, assessing and hiring.

In the short term, this makes sense. It can foster stronger relationships between corporate recruiters and hiring managers. It can allow more people to be involved in the hiring process. There are more discussions about employment branding and employee value propositions.

But let’s be careful about leaving this as a long-term or even an intermediate term solution.

Listing a job description on the company’s careers page and posting on Workopolis is no longer sufficient to stay ahead and attract the top candidates. You will have a difficult time maintaining a full collection of prospects who are interested helping to build your brand, sell your widgets or design the next big thing.

Twitter, Linkedin, specialty job boards, viral marketing, deep web searching. These are just some of the tools that push your information out into the marketplace to show that your organization is the employer of choice in your space.

We research these emerging trends in candidate awareness and implement progressive strategies everyday for every search. In fact, the research factor that we offer is separate and distinct from the assessment, interview and relationship building elements and is carried out by a certified individual with a highly specialized skill set.

One more thing: just as all these new tools make people more findable for us, they also give people the choice to be more easily found. If one of your employees has a bad day, all they need to do is click the mouse a few times and they can announce to the world that they are ready for a change.

Maybe it’s time for your internal resources to do what they do best: retain the talent that you have. Let’s face it; no one does that better than you. After all, why would you read all of the resumes in the haystack to find the one needle when we might have a whole pack of excellent needles available to you right here?